November 22, 2012 8:33pm ESTNovember 21, 2012 5:15pm ESTCarl Edwards doesn't know new crew chief Jimmy Fennig well, and he can barely get him to talk. But he is looking forward to Fennig's old-school approach. Their goal: Build fast cars and get back into the Chase.

Carl Edwards doesn't know his 2013 crew chief all that well, even though Jimmy Fennig has worked for Roush Fenway Racing ever since Edwards first joined the organization in 2003.

Fennig, 59, doesn't talk a lot. He just builds fast racecars and makes old-school gut judgments on pit road. This year, he led Matt Kenseth to three victories and a seventh-place finish in the Sprint Cup standings.

Edwards, trying to get to know Fennig, went to talk to him while Fennig was standing by one of Kenseth's cars last week. Fennig tried to shoo him away, not wanting him to see everything he had done with Kenseth's car.

"I wanted to see how he did things," Edwards said. "I started looking and he wouldn't even let me look at Matt's car because there was one race left. He is pretty serious. I think that is cool."

Back in February, a crew-chief change for Edwards was the furthest thing from people's minds. He and crew chief Bob Osborne were coming off a year when they had tied for the Cup title, losing a tiebreaker to Tony Stewart.

But Edwards never got into a rhythm this year, and Osborne stepped aside amid the team's struggles and an undisclosed health issues.

Chad Norris came in, and Edwards showed signs of improvement, but not enough. He finished 15th in the standings with just three top-five and 13 top-10 finishes.

So last week, team co-owner Jack Roush appointed Fennig as Edwards' crew chief for 2013.

"It's strange and it's frustrating — we show these flashes of speed and (are still) mediocre a lot," Edwards said. "That's one of the things that is neat for me is to go work with Jimmy, who is having success right now with Matt so I can see if it's something I'm doing wrong or something I'm missing.

"That's good for me. I don't want to go into another new situation, not run well and then say we should have gone through this tried-and-true situation with Jimmy."

Fennig, who won the 2004 Cup title with Kurt Busch and has 33 career wins, including victories with Bobby Allison and Mark Martin, said he needed a job and would do what the team asks of him. Initially, he thought that would be crew chief for Kenseth replacement Ricky Stenhouse Jr., but Roush told him last week that it would be with Edwards.

"I've never worked with Carl before and I have very seldom talked to him over the years," Fennig said. "I'm the type of crew chief that I focus in on the job at hand and the driver I have and don't really pay too much attention to other drivers."

Edwards said it was still to be determined whether he would just get Fennig's entire crew or whether it would be a mix. But it appears he likely will be working mostly with the current Fennig-led crew from Kenseth's team.

"It's a well-oiled team that has an expectation to win and I was concerned whether they would have the patience to really give Ricky time to get up to speed," Roush said. "Carl's experience is justified and we can do that immediately with Jimmy.

"Jimmy had his own set of conditions that he needed from me and from Carl in terms of the kind of commitment we would make for the success of the deal. Of course, I'm all-in and Carl is all-in, so we feel we've got a really great situation there."

Roush said the key will be that Fennig will use the team's engineers more than a crew chief such as Osborne, who was an engineer himself.

"One of the difficulties we had with Carl's program is that the engineers with the 99 were not really as able to be on their own as they needed to be with a crew chief that was an engineer," Roush said. "Jimmy's program is all organized with engineers that give him the support he requires.

"He holds court and plays the part of a judge between the theories he's come up with, based on what he sees in the garage and what his experience tells him, and what flows from the computers."

Edwards said he didn't demand the change but that it was best for the company.

"From what I can tell he is just very, very competitive," Edwards said of Fennig. "He is old school in a number of ways but it seems like he does a very good job of getting the most out of all his people.

"That is the model crew chief right now. A guy who doesn't know everything but is a guy that can get everything and the best out of the people around them."